Movies that shape our lives

IN 1934, a cash-strapped young newspaper man, played by Clark Gable, and a wilful millionaire’s daughter (Claudette Colbert) found themselves on the road. The comedy It Happened One Night became a sensation for a number of reasons: sexy leads, snappy backchat, a dash of realism, the promise of romance and a dash of impropriety in a scene where the absconding duo are forced to share a room.

When Clark Gable raised that eyebrow and slipped off his shirt, audiences gasped

When Gable raised that eyebrow and slipped off his shirt, audiences gasped at a revelation more impressive than his biceps. He wasn’t wearing a vest. Over the following months, sales of the garment plunged.

Forty-three years later, Diane Keaton’s character in Woody Allen’s love-gone-missing comedy Annie Hall assembled her outfits from her grandmother’s attic and thrift shops. Baggy trousers, ties and waistcoats, floppy hats, old spectacles; by 1978 all these found their way into shop windows from haute couture to high street. It was the most incongruous of fashion crazes.

Yet it was more than that. Women didn’t initially adopt the Annie Hall look just because it looked cute. They were buying into her brand of feminism: she was opinionated but not threatening, sexually liberated (no bra) but not necessarily sexually available or at least not always to Woody’s character. In the same way Gable in 1934 represented an honest bare-chested guy making his way in the Depression, as opposed to Colbert’s effete fiancé (silk vest for him, no doubt).

When Clark Gable raised that eyebrow and slipped off his shirt, audiences gasped

Magazines of the Thirties are full of tips for the ordinary woman to adopt the stars’ styles. Joan Crawford’s sealskin and fox cape, for example, could be emulated with velvet and some nicely dyed “bunny” fur at the wrists.

Yet the real identification has been with the Hollywood ethos of making good from nothing, even at some personal cost. That fable of achievement A Star Is Born was first seen on screen in 1937, subsequently remade with Judy Garland in 1954, less successfully with Barbra Streisand in 1976 and now there is talk of a version with Beyoncé Knowles, directed by Clint Eastwood.

Increasingly our references are to characters and situations from films rather than literature. Two of Celia Johnson’s beautifully understated performances in war-time films, Brief Encounter and In Which We Serve, now epitomise a particularly British sense of self-sacrifice and gracious duty. John Wayne, rightly or wrongly given his own lack of military record, likewise stood for American independence, tenacity and martial valour. If you want to summon up the small-town fellow battling the system, then James Stewart pops up in the Frank Capra comedies.

Politicians have exploited this association. The myth of the West, made iconic through western films such as John Ford’s Stagecoach in 1939, has buoyed up the rhetoric of American presidents including Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and more recently George W Bush.

B-movie actor Ronald Reagan traded on his cowboy past (although his screen appearances in chaps had mostly been on television) sometimes employing Western metaphors in his foreign policy speeches. In another cinematic idiom, he also, of course, invoked Star Wars terminology when he referred in a speech in 1983 to the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire.

But film is not only a model, it is also a mirror and on occasions a crystal ball. It is easier with hindsight to see traces in films of national concerns and neuroses, signs that might not have been apparent at the time. Looking back, what we now call film noir begins in Europe before the Second World War with stories of fatal encounters among ordinary people driven by extraordinary desires, such as the train driver in Jean Renoir’s La Bête Humaine.

As it moves to America all those drifters and returning soldiers fooled by treacherous dames are dogged by guilt, disillusion and deception.

Move on to the Fifties and the zombies and aliens who are lurking unsuspected among the affluent community in films such as Invasion Of The Body Snatchers now seem to speak of other concerns about the way society was moving. So powerful is the effect of film on us that since the Twenties arbiters of morals and behaviour have commissioned studies on its effects. The debates about violence or promiscuity or decadence continue even now although the methods of checking may have changed from dipping children’s fingers in electrolytic fluid as they watched the screen to sophisticated monitoring to see which parts of the brain are stimulated by certain kinds of action.

THE effects of films can be lasting and subtle, impossible to plot on a laboratory experiment. We imagine that we think in “flashback” although that is actually a film technique rather than a demonstrable fact of neuroscience. For years, the Freud-made-simple of a film like Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) set a pattern. A man (or woman) has a problem, best described as some kind of mental padlock that prevents normal functioning. One fact is uncovered; it is the key that unlocks the whole mystery. Modern therapy would hardly take that line but emotionally many of us still cling to the idea.

Similarly, there are some suggestions that certain of our memories are in effect “downloaded” from film. One study of Vietnam veterans’ recall of alleged atrocities appeared to indicate they had in fact subconsciously “inserted” events from The Deer Hunter or Rambo in their own recollections.

If film has invaded our subconscious, it’s also true that it came from there in the first place. Early reactions to the first features draw on the parallels between film and dream. Jean Cocteau described film rather as a dream in which we all participate together through a kind of hypnosis. The Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami reckons it is more effective than psychotherapy, that as we sit together in the safety of the dark the image “lifts” us out of ourselves and allows for self-scrutiny. It can even allow us to rehearse the unthinkable. It can be no coincidence that Fifties films are peopled by the departed, by ghosts and spectres.

Over more than 100 years, film has pervaded our sense of ourselves, our ambitions of achievement, even our perception of other countries. We can dismiss it as escapist entertainment but with a century of moving images all around us, that is seriously to underestimate its power.

Francine Stock’s book In Glorious Technicolor is published by Chatto & Windus on October 6, priced £18.99. To reserve your copy with free UK delivery, please send a cheque or PO made payable to the Sunday Express Bookshop to: PO Box 200, Falmouth, TR11 4WJ, or telephone 0871 988 8366 with credit/debit card details or order online at expressbookshop.com. Calls cost 10p per minute from BT landlines.

Francine Stock presents The Film Programme on Radio Four at 4.30pm on Fridays, repeated at 11pm on Sundays.